GAIL ANDERSON-DARGATZ'S THE SPAWNING GROUNDS AND THE CULTURAL APPROPRIATION DISCUSSION

Last month I gave a paper at ACCUTE on a 2016 novel by Gail Anderson-Dargatz, a British Columbia writer whose works are typically set in Turtle Valley, located in the Shuswap region of the interior of the province. Her fiction offers vivid portrayals of young girls and women struggling for self-assertion in the face of social and familial constraints, and she powerfully evokes the landscape. As I continue to work on this novel, I am thinking about the different constructions of cultural property in Indigenous nations (variable, of course, across nations) and in settler legal systems that emphasize copyright and other forms of intellectual property for printed work but that have less ability to grapple with the complexities of oral stories.

Anderson-Dargatz's acclaimed novel The Cure for Death by Lightning was one of the depictions of sexual violence that informed my oh-so-many-years-ago dissertation on contemporary women's historical fiction about trauma; re-reading this early work, this past spring, I was reminded of her extraordinarily nimble sketch of domestic life, with its focus on women's sewing and cooking and friendships. As in her most recent fiction, Indigenous and settler women forge close bonds, providing crucial support for one another.

This image of a reconciliation-era British Columbia where Indigenous stories are set by side with settler family histories, and Indigenous and settler women offer one another comfort and care, is tempting. Context matters, and willed amnesia about the clash of different legal orders is an enduring part of this province. The legal dispossession of dozens of autonomous First Nations was achieved without even the legal pretense of treaties: after an initial effort by Governor James Douglas to negotiate terms for what were viewed by the new arrivals as land surrenders (but by the First Nations, crucially, as agreements for sharing the land), most of what is now British Columbia was transferred to settlers without benefit of treaty. Indigenous lands were surveyed and reserves were subsequently rigorously cut back to a tiny patchwork of plots, while Indigenous peoples were precluded from pre-empting land.

This is history, but it is also the present. The contemporary treaty process has been slow and cumbersome, producing only a few agreements to date. At the conclusion of a treaty process, First Nations owe millions in legal fees to the government which advanced the money. Meanwhile, Supreme Court decisions, notably Delgamu'ukw and Tsilqot'in, have provided important guidance about Aboriginal Title as the right to the land itself (not just to a use of the land) that governments have shown they are reluctant to respect.

Margery Fee's important book, Literary Land Claims, as well as her discussions of appropriation elsewhere, point to how carefully we need to look at law, history, and literature together, particularly in British Columbia. And here is where my appreciation for Anderson-Dargatz's work become a critical worrying. What kind of ideological work is her fiction performing? When she uses Secepemc and other stories, is her use of these stories properly authorized? What are the critical criteria that should be applied in assessing whether her work is appropriate--or appropriative?

The novel's strong environmental concerns are foregrounded in this story of the descendants of the region's first settler being possessed by a malicious water-spirit, Salmon-Boy. The family members' ties to one another have been fractured by the mother's suicide, some years earlier, while she was possessed. Now her teenaged son is demonstrating similar symptoms, including an obsession with reproducing pictographs and an uncanny understanding of the Secwepemctsin language.

This trope of Indigenous spirits haunting and possessing settler Canadians was also a central aspect of A Cure for Death By Lightning, Anticipating potential criticism, Anderson-Dargatz has described her recent work as an effort to connect Indigenous and European settler cultures by identifying parallel story traditions of water spirits. In a blog post titled “Building Bridges,” she wonders, “Do I, this white girl, have the right to find inspiration in First Nations stories? . . . Can I find inspiration in the Shuswap stories I grew up with? Or, because I’m of British descent, can I only draw from the myths of my mother’s ancestors, from stories that originated in countries I have only visited?”

What interests me the most in the novel is its use of pictographs, which appear in the legal theory of John Borrows (Anishinaabe), the visual art and site-specific work of Marianne Nicolson (Scottish and Dzawada̱'enux̱w), as well as in the work of a range of non-Indigenous Canadian authors, including Fred Wah and Margaret Atwood (Surfacing). Pictographs are difficult to date, but they establish the facts of prior settlement, demonstrating a tangible tie between First Nations and the territories they assert as their own. For settler British Columbians to become obsessed with pictographs, then, represents the kind of desire to Indigenize described by Terry Goldie. To be haunted by Indigenous spirits, further, indicates an immersion in Indigenous cultural stories, a sense of belonging, that risks usurping the claims of Indigenous people by adopting them as a form of intangible property.